From SimCity to Real Girlfriend: 20 years of sim games

Simulations have been one of gaming's most important genres. In part one of …

Rome wasn't built in a day

Sims also went back in time. The ancient Romans have a reputation for being great city planners, so it comes as no surprise that someone thought to make a city-building game set in ancient Rome. Caesar was released for the Amiga in 1992, with the addition of military planning (but not fighting or combat) further differentiating the game from SimCity. The fusing of history, city building, and a touch of real-time strategy proved a hit, and a sequel followed in 1995. Caesar II better upheld the idea of a living city than SimCity, with citizens, soldiers, and workers visibly moving around the screen attending to their business.

Caesar on the Amiga.

The early 90s also brought other interesting twists to the city-building genre, including strategy-sim hybrids Castles (1991) and Castles 2 (1992), both of which involved building and designing castles, The Patrician (1992), which focused more on trading simulation, and the first two games in real-time strategy series The Settlers (1993).

The Settlers I and II contained considerable simulation elements, with each building manned by an autonomous citizen who relied on an efficient transportation and supply network to both get the resources he needed and to send out whatever he produced. Building a network of roads and trying to manage the distribution of resources—you had charge of the entire economy, including food and even beer distribution—fit well with the slow pace of the games, which took hours to play and stole away months of fans' lives. Later Settlers games de-emphasized these elements, trending the series more toward traditional (but still slow-paced) real-time strategy.

The original Settlers (pictured) offered a charming economic and city building simulation with a complex distribution network. Its sequel increased this complexity without losing any charm.

Other historically themed city building games were released around the turn of the century, including a third Caesar game, which further emphasized the life sim aspects of the series, Anno 1602 (1998), the first entry in the excellent RTS/city-building/trading-sim hybrid Anno series, and a number of less successful games from Caesar developer Impressions Games.

Caesar IV, the most recent title in the Caesar series, would not arrive until 2006, with development led by former members of the now-defunct Impressions Games. It featured fully 3D graphics—as has been the trend—in place of the isometric view of old.

In Anno 1602, you built a colony town (or towns) and traded to improve your economy.

Complexity

All of these were blown out of the water by SimCity 3000 (1999), however, which significantly added to the complexity of its predecessor and required players to manage even garbage disposal and to strike business deals with neighboring cities.

SimCity 4 emerged in 2003, receiving rave reviews and a number of awards while also being criticized for overly difficult gameplay—the series had become too complex for many people to appreciate. There was an overhaul of the transportation system, a much more detailed simulation of city life, the addition of regions that contain multiple cities, the addition of a MySim mode (for integration with The Sims), a day/night cycle, and countless other changes from the earlier SimCity games.

But a wealth of new features and enhancements meant nothing to those who couldn't build even a functional suburb. It looked like building and management games had peaked, and SimCity in particular could not risk further deepening the complexity.

For many fans of the series, SimCity 4 went too far in adding realism.

Filling the void

There hasn't been a new SimCity in eight years—unless you count the largely forgettable 2007 spin-off SimCity Societies, which introduced six "societal values" that would change the appearance of a city as it developed. While fans clamor for an update to the seminal city building franchise, others have stepped in to fill the void.

The Tropico series continues, with Tropico 3 released to critical praise in late 2009. This installment took the game into polygonal 3D and fleshed out the political simulation—it even featured a customizable avatar for your in-game persona, who travels around the island interacting with the environment or addressing his subjects (or running from insurgents).

Tropico 3.

Cities XL 2011 ditched the MMO component that was core to its unsuccessful predecessor (Cities XL), which allowed trading between players on a shared "planet," and focused instead on the previously under-emphasized single-player campaign. The thing that the Cities XL franchise seems to have going for it is an easier learning curve than SimCity 4, making deep city-building games accessible to a new generation (without forcing them to play the older titles in the genre).

Cities XL 2011 has all the makings of a SimCity spiritual successor.

Fans of the simplicity found in older city-building sims still have a place to go, though, as there are portable adaptations of SimCity 3000 for the Nintendo DS and Apple's iOS devices and open-source projects such as LinCity and Micropolis (which is based on the original SimCity). More accessible titles like Virtual City can also serve as nice introductions to the genre.

The prolonged absence of SimCity may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, as it encourages new developers to tackle the genre and innovate without fear of being crushed by the name recognition and marketing power of the genre mainstay.